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Comment by karzeem | Hacker News Reader

Adding multi-touch to PC screens without reinventing the form factor is one of those visions of the future that our grandchildren will chuckle about. It reminds me of a cartoon I saw from 1900, depicting a classroom of the year 2000. Presciently, the students had access to any book ever printed—there was a huge machine with a tube that spit out the requested book.

Multi-touch will almost certainly work its way into larger-than-iPhone form factors. But just as certainly, they will have to be different than the ones we're used to.

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I think a laptop would work with the bottom half (Where there is currently a keyboard + trackpad), as a second LCD which is touch sensitive.

The default arangement could be to simply have a keyboard displayed on the bottom half, with a trackpad area, but then with other apps you might want to manipulate graphics, or paint, or do other cool stuff on that bottom area.

It'd take a little while to get used to non moving keys, but typing on the iPhone is pretty easy once you get the hang of it, and I'm sure there are technologies that could give some sort of little feedback to the fingers.

(This sounds quite like an enlarged Nintendo DS really).

That way also, you get one clean LCD, and a separate one that gets a little dirty from fingers, and has to be cleaned. Seems a good plan to me.

Another possibility would be to have a smaller area, like a touch pad, that corresponded to the screen. Wouldn't be great for detail work, but would save space and cost and I suspect it wouldn't be too hard to get used to doing multitouch stuff on it.

I believe apple has something similar to this in the case that they have a multi-touch track pad which can recognize some multi-touch commands. I'm not sure to what extent you can use it for though. (of course, macs still have the keyboard.)

I went out with some friends weeks ago. I found several girls were using blackberry and I asked them how do they like it and had they tried iPhone.

A girl told me she tried and she just couldn't use the multitouch on iPhone. I looked at her beautifully polished nails then I understood we really need hot female engineers in a consumer product team. Not for gender balance but just we can discover that current multi touch interface just won't go with fake nails.

Lol. You might as well ask for the loch ness monster in your QA department.

I wonder why people work in the big compound beside Lake Samammish never found the problem. I live in NYC so we have more sex and the city women here. But I've been Seattle, even more men there but how come they've never discover this problem in their QA team?

-- edit --

To be fair to MS, the fake nails don't go with multi touch happens only in iphone's form factor, because the key is very small, but on common touchpad and keyboards, fake nails doesn't hamper finger tip to touch the keyboard.

Or they could just use the Tablet-PC form factor

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